12/30/2023 0 Comments Inside 747 cockpitI understand that traveling is stressful and sometimes downright torturous, but please do not take it out on the poor flight attendant or gate agent. Passengers who think the world revolves around them and who take out their frustrations on the employees. What’s your biggest annoyance when it comes to passengers? We work long days and arrive to the hotel exhausted with sometimes less than eight hours to shower, sleep and get ready to do it all over in the morning. Free breakfast and a comfortable bed have sadly become highlights of the trip. The time away from home. Traveling around North America may sound glamorous, but the inside of a hotel is usually all we may see of a town. One reason most pilots stay in this profession is because we love what we do. We love to fly. If you know what jet I’m referring to then congratulations, you are a real Travelzoo pro! What’s your favorite thing about your job? I fly a 50-seat regional jet all over North America sometimes referred to as the Barbie Jet or Pencil Jet. As of today, I’ve been a first officer for over six years at a large regional airline. After a year and a half of living off ramen noodles, I upgraded to peanuts as an airline first officer making $25,000 my first year. I started college and flight training in the summer of 2001 and received my bachelor’s in aviation sciences in 2005. After getting in $80,000 of debt for flight training and a bachelor’s degree, I started my first professional flying job flight instructing for a salary of $18,000 a year. First off, what was the process like to become an airline pilot? On some airplanes you have to pass through the passenger cabin to reach the bunks or lavatories on others, like the 747, you need never leave the cockpit area and can move freely between the bunk and the bathroom in your pajamas.Travelzoo sat down with a first officer for a major regional airline and found out the answers to everything we’ve always wanted to ask a pilot - from their biggest annoyances to whether turning off your cell phone is really that important. (When I started to fly 747s, the cockpit lavatory, a standard airplane fitting, contained a most unlikely feature: a baby changing table that was only later removed to save weight.) Many long-haul planes have pilot bunks. Some airplanes have a bathroom inside the cockpit for this reason the 747 is often called the ensuite fleet. Some planes have windows that open, a blessed feature when you’re dining in the cockpit between flights and wish to feel the breeze on your face, especially if you have flown from somewhere cold to somewhere warm and have only three-quarters of an hour until you must fly home to winter. Airbus cockpits are beloved for their foldout tables, an enormous enhancement to the pilot’s quality of life when completing paperwork or a meal I also found the cup holders and sun visors were more intuitively located on the Airbus. Other differences between aircraft are so small in the context of such Earth-crossing, mile-vanquishing vessels that it feels ungrateful to dwell on them. Before moving the flaps, he turned to me, with a clearing of the throat and a smile-from over the glasses resting halfway down his nose-that said, What are these youngsters coming to? ![]() Once, soon after I switched from Airbus to Boeing, flying with a senior captain, I mistakenly asked him to select flaps zero. On the 747, the same position is called flaps up. On the Airbus, the fully stowed position of the flaps is called flaps zero. There is a friendly rivalry between the pilots of Boeing and Airbus aircraft, which in addition to everything else are two competing realms of language. In a phenomenon called type reversion, a pilot inadvertently refers to a term or procedure from a previous aircraft type. Acquiring these words and their correct usage is a significant part of the work we put into a new type rating. Indeed each aircraft type or family has its language, or at least its own dialect, and analogous devices and procedures often have different names on different aircraft. The bond between a pilot and his or her current type of airplane is hard to pin down.
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